Jo Cox’s Politics

I will not be in the country when the Brexit result comes in – I’ve already voted. It is no secret I have voted to remain in the EU.

Leaving aside my personal views I cannot recall a more dispiriting political campaign in my lifetime. Both sides have been economical with the truth and often when challenged have repeated known lies as true facts.

But somehow that has almost come to be no more than we expect.

UKIP’s use a photograph of fleeing Syrian refugees and Mr Farage’s defence of it is something quite different. Those people did not ask to the put on a hoarding to be mocked or to have their human needs inhumanely exploited to make a cheap talking point.

Parliament had been recalled to honour a very different sort of politics and politician.

Jo Cox stood for something so much better. She worked with refugees and fought tirelessly for the dispossessed of whom this world posses far too many. Those were her values; they informed her public life and caused her all too public death.

Jo Cox reminded us all of our duty towards those whom birth’s accident has made poor; whom ignorance has made vulnerable;and whose want is made by war. Every generation in every time meets these people afresh. We can choose to do something; or we can choose to do nothing. The angels of our better natures prompt us to do the right thing by those less fortunate who surround us but we still have to act as our consciences dictate and not listen to the dictates of fear.

Jox Cox was not the victim of idle coincidence. She was not killed because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her assailant sought her out. She was murdered because of those values.

The faces of those anonymous people on that photograph of the Syrian refugees on the UKIP hoarding are people just like us – in different circumstances they might even have been us – just like those faces on the black and white photographs from the concentration camps were people just like us.

“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” Senator Edward kennedy 1980….